Market Overview: Smart Grid Security Vendors

"Smart grids" are the modernization and digitization of aging, inefficient, and unreliable power grids. Smart grids will bring many tangible benefits to both home and business energy consumers, such as lower costs and integration of cleaner energy sources. However, because smart grids create interconnected critical infrastructure components from the consumer to the utility via an IP network, there are inherent security and risk concerns. Consumers need to worry about the protection and privacy of their sensitive information. Utility CISOs need to worry about this too, but they also have to worry about cyberattacks designed to bring down the grid itself. Security concerns can and will impede smart grid progress if they are not dealt with in early planning phases. In this report, Forrester provides an overview of the security solutions that address vulnerabilities in four critical areas of the smart grid. This will benefit not only security professionals in the utility industry but all security professionals, because in the near future, we will all rely on a smart grid for energy, and the security of it and all its interconnected components (smart meters, smart sensors) will affect every organization.